A Rough Trade
by EwokPoet
Summary: Just like the map that BB-8 had the last puzzle piece of, a story of a young man's fall to the dark side can only be told as a puzzle, pieced together by multiple people, none of whom have all the details, all of whom approach it from a different point of view.
1. Prologue

location data: Jedi training grounds  
weather data: downpour  
holovideo message id: 1138

 _You are reckless! You are reckless! You are reckless! You are reckless! You are reckless! You are reckless! You are reckless! You are reckless! You are reckless!_

At this point, I cannot determine if the ghost that is Master Yoda is really speaking to me, or if I am no longer able to silence my guilty conscience. And guilt, it's an emotion that should not plague a Jedi. Not in hard times like these. Not when every single word he ever said to me and every single word he may have said to my father has ultimately lead to my doing what he had once done - going into exile. Does he want me to change my decision? Does he think I'm approaching things in black and white, as if I were a Sith? Is this him, at all?

 _You are reckless!_

Why, Yoda? And why Yoda? And out of all wise things he said to me, why does the one that was, ultimately, wrong, stick out? Why everything else seems garbled, twisted around, and spoken in a language I do not even understand. Could it be that no other soul who ever lived, that nobody else out of the three beings who became one with the living Force can reach through to me? Could it be that this place is so strong with the dark side?

Where is old Ben, when I need him most? He guided me through all the decisions I have made during the worst and the darkest of times and now, he is not speaking to me. Whoever had taught him to have the patience he had for a wide-eyed boy from the place where the maker had said goodnight to the world must have been somebody reckless himself, in some way.

Where is my father? The one who sometime comes to visit me in the shape of a young man I never knew, with the face I have never seen, as the one dying in my arms was disfigured and helpless. The one who redeemed himself in the end? The alleged Chosen One?

My thoughts are betraying me and my feelings are failing me. I understand that this place is now the closest to hell as one can be, so many slaughtered, innocent souls lying motionless in the rain. Is somebody trying to make me think something I otherwise would not? Did I underestimate his abilities, just like his father once thought of mine as a delusion, at the worst point possible...right now?

Was training my nephew ultimately a mistake, no worse than master Yoda claimed would have been Ben training my father?

Was I ignoring the signs from the very beginning because he was my nephew? Was this the reason the Jedi of the old Republic used to be so strict?

Why did I not learn anything from the fragments of all those stories about my father? I traced every single thing, every single story, everything that would help Leia and I learn more about who we were and ultimately, it was all stolen from me and reconnected in the form of a sinister cube puzzle that was nowhere like the one the two of us put together?

So many things I cannot find the answers for, but I know the answer to the last one.

It's easy – because nobody ever stopped me or doubted me! That is one of the reasons I wonder why young Ben – whom I will never call by any other name - ended up obsessed with somebody who was always stopped and doubted, regardless of how much love we gave him.

His story was never similar to my father's. Anakin Skywalker - whom I will never call by any other name, as he is ultimately the one he was born as, the one he died as - grew up in poverty. Slavery. In the shadows, on a remote world where shadows were a rare sight to behold, yet everybody was a shadow quietly existing under the rule of a tyrant.

Ben, he had everything he could possibly wish for. He grew up as the son of two heroes of the Galactic Civil War. He was free to do whatever he pleased. He wanted to become a Jedi himself.

Perhaps that was a problem, too?

Sometimes, I hear a woman's voice, but I cannot see her. She is in great pain and she keeps on repeating "I know there's good in him." I cannot fully recognise her face, though it seems like I have always known her. I have an idea of who this might be and whose memory is being shown to me, but it's dangerous, incredibly dangerous, to take things out of context. Therefore, this mere assumption will not be a part of my message.

 _You are reckless!_

Be quiet, my master. I never begged for anything, I never even begged a monster of a man, the emptiest of the empty souls to spare my life; but now I am questioning myself so much, I feel another wrestling session with the dark side coming along and this is not the way of the Jedi. Perhaps you would have said that I should go somewhere strong in the dark side, like you did and feed and clothe my demons, instead of escaping them. Know your enemy. But what if your enemy is...

a chirp of warning in droid binary language  
a sigh and a coughing sound

I am sorry for having addressed my former master and not you, all along. From this point on, I am directly addressing you.

Ultimately, the biggest of the mistakes happen when one takes things out of context and takes them to a hyperlane less travelled. And the only thing I can do is preserve this story in its entirety, until the time is right for you to read it.

There are things I am not willing to preserve in their entirety, but by now, you should have figured out what they are and you, you're watching this with me; unless there is no good in the world left and you're sitting by my corpse.

But I have faith in you. And there is nothing else I believe in right now. Just you.

And I am not reckless. Not anymore.

a witty chirp in droid binary language


	2. Chapter 01

Thank you so much for the overwhelmingly positive response, everybody! I was not used to anything other than tumbleweeds on here.

* * *

:::a compassionate chirp in droid binary language:::

Reckless, reckless, reckless, reckless, reckless. I know, Artoo. The moment I stop all my thoughts and I'm no longer tied to my surroundings, there is nothing but my former Master repeating this. At this point, however, I wonder if he's talking about me, or him. I dare not think what he calls himself now.

It all started with a seemingly innocent situation. And it ended in the worst way possible - with history repeating. The kind that should have never repeated.

After many invites I let slide, I was back to the Forest Moon of Endor, for the anniversary of the battle, reflection and meditation. Many times before, I visualised everything, the way we left it. The rustling leaves and fern underneath our feet in the woods. The twin-sun-burnt grass on the clearing where the Shield Bunker used to be. The shadow casted by the remaining chicken walkers that stood still wherever their retrieving and captured pilots had last left them, and the silent corpse of the one my brave friend once hijacked, closest to the Bunker. There were times when I visualised it fall, at the strength of the explosion. I was not there to witness how exactly this played out, but I was aware of my sister being in danger and I could feel her get blasted in the shoulder.

:::a sad chirp in droid binary language:::

No, I could not feel your being wounded. I appreciate your trying to make me feel better, the best way you know how.

:::a sarcastic chirp in droid binary language:::

I was there when you shocked him, I was hanging from a pole above the fire pit. And no, I could not have possibly felt that.

What you just reminded me of is yet another thing that could have led me to realising that something was wrong to begin with and, in case you wake up to a grim future that has been stripped off any knowledge of there having been two major Force factions in the past and whoever is behind my fallen Padawan rewrites the history, you may have to clarify this, how it works, to those who attempt to slice you. When one has the Force, there are various degrees of connections that we may feel with others who do. Sometimes, we recognise one another from the very first moment we look into each other's eyes. In my case, this was almost always happening with the beings strong in light side of the Force. I can feel them. I can feel the good in them even if they're having a fit of rage. I can sense their love even when they're radiating fear. This is something that the Old Jedi Order may have got wrong.

Perhaps it was thoughts like these that should have brought me back to Endor throughout the years I was absent. Perhaps it was the other way round and my conflicting feelings and the meditations I knew would be taking place were slightly frightening. The planetoid was strong in the dark side of the Force. The Emperor died there…the man who chaotically emitted dark side energy from his body even when my redeemed Father was throwing him down the shift! And he killed my father, who redeemed himself saving me and the Galaxy. The time I had with him was limited to mere minutes. This led me to believe that Anakin Skywalker had accepted the roughest trade of his life in order to leave the fate of the Jedi Order, the Forest Moon of Endor and the Galaxy at large in the hands of somebody who could see through his own eyes and was significantly more able-bodied than him. I lost him before I could even think of getting to know him. Sooner than my first Master. Even sooner than my second Master. What seems like centuries, compared to the family that raised me.

It was only later that I found out that some of the other times my Father had bargained with the Force, played sabacc with the Universe were far rougher trades, the ones that sent the whole spiral of souls, worlds and destinies collapsing into the not-so-bright centre of the Galaxy. And nothing can escape a black hole, regardless of its innocence in the grand scheme of things. Nothing. Including the very last thing that spiralled there – himself. Such are the ways of the Force. Such are the ways of the Galaxy. Sometimes, they overlap.

This may be why I had been avoiding the Forest Moon. It was the privilege of teaching others and carrying the legacy of the Jedi Order that made me rethink my decisions. But this time, when it all started, I was confident in my abilities and I knew, deep within, that I could stop all the dark thoughts.

Leia and Han were to join us the next day, travelling from a diplomatic mission on Roon. My Padawan, their son and my best student at the new Praxeum was coming along with me. In lack of actual missions to build his strength as a Jedi, a trip down the memory hyperlane was the most I could have offered him. If nothing else, I wanted to teach him how to stop dark thoughts.

Little did I know that this trip would eventually send him on his only mission.

Little did I know that Endor would be still blasting the shockwaves his way, somehow.

The moment we came out of hyperspace and the lush green conifer trees appeared below us, the only thing I had on my mind was the sheer realisation that I forgot where the funeral pyre for Father had been. Whatever Ben's face may have been like at this moment, however bemused he may have been – I did not see it.

We landed on a small, but well-kept trading post turned micro-spaceport, located on a clearing close to the Bright Tree Village. The directional lights were flickering like holograms sent from the other side of the Galaxy and I had an impression that the duracrete panels were too far apart in a couple of places in the landing area. But this was Endor, the forgotten planetoid where little to nothing has changed.

As I took my first breath of the fragrant, clear air, Ben looked around.

"No one is there." He said, once our two-seater touched the landing beacon. "Why would anybody want to live here in the first place? We're practically at the edge of the world as we know it."

He was wrong. Somebody was coming our way from the long corridor separating the landing area from the other facilities. I did not know whom we were to expect, all I knew was that it was not going to be Cobb Salfur, the one-time member of the Endor Strike Team. He had moved on some years ago.

Ben pouted at the sight of the person approaching us. "It's a girl."

He spotted her before I did. And indeed, it was a 'girl'. I had given up on guessing people's age by this point in time. By her clothes – blue trousers tucked in knee-high ruffled red boots and a green tunic, she could have been anywhere between 20 and 40 years old.

"Why are you wearing those stupid boots?" Ben asked her. She shrugged it off, pulled her face in something resembling a smile and addressed me.

"Goopa. I mean, hello…Master Skywalker, right?"

"Call me Luke."

"They call me Kami." She extended her hand. I noticed that she did not use any title – or last name, for that matter. But her handshake was reasonably firm, a strange contrast to a voice so flat.

Ben was more curious than I had expected him to be. "Is that really your name?"

She grinned. "No. I said that they call me that."

I was about to say that I used to have a friend named Camie at home, under two different and much rougher suns, but what would that have meant to her? Clearly, this woman was a different kind of a hermit. Maybe this was a foreshadowing of the subtlest possible kind?

"Ewoks. They pronounced the word 'cam' like that. Cam, as in holocam. And I always have holocams around, so that's what they were yelling the first time they pointed at me. It was long ago. And it stuck." She finally smiled and there was a slight change in her tone. "Let's go."

Kami led us through the transparisteel corridor to the living quarters. The corridor walls were lined with metal and they seemed oddly familiar. Once upon a time, in a similar corridor, Father led me to what could have been the end of it all. Ironically, this corridor may have been built to resemble that particular one.

When we arrived to the other side, I observed the surroundings. A small square, much like the one in the Ewok village itself. A warehouse and a transparisteel-lined office. Something that resembled a log cabin.

"If you have a log cabin, how come you don't live in the trees?" Ben was suspicious. "It's not like your long cabin actually blends in, given all the artificial material used around it."

"When this little spaceport was originally conceived as a trading post, the Republic officials decided to raise eight duracrete columns, as opposed to using actual trees." Kami stuck in the keycard, opened the doors to her office and sat down to register us. She didn't even turn to Ben. "They did not want to offend Ewok religious sensibilities. The trees, they are sacred."

The registration process was quick. The less Ben talked, the nicer Kami seemed to be. She showed us the refreshers and the comm area, and then pointed to the barracks.

"You could stay there. Nobody else is visiting at the moment. A Mon Calamari, old soldier, was here last time around, and there is this certain charming man that visits every year…"

"Lando!" I thought.

"…but you could also stay with us. We don't have somebody like you coming here every day."

I nodded and let Kami take us to the log cabin, much to Ben's dismay. That was a strange place, and I have seen many strange places.

The spacious master room was full of devices the purpose of which I could not quite determine, but I was sure of one thing: they were not used by smugglers and rogues. The man sitting in the middle of that chaos did not strike me as such. He did not notice us come in, but the little girl sitting next to him did. She dropped three Endorian rabbit cubs from her lap, grabbed the fourth by its three ears and tip-toed to us.

"Are you the great deejay?" She cocked her head and stood on one leg. Then she put a finger in front of her mouth and, in a much louder voice, added. "Where is your robe? Every deejay has a robe!"

"Sorry, Soluna tends to be like this…you know…" The man finally noticed us. At first glance, he seemed to at least a decade older than his female companion. "…shy and awkward like me, but with a talent for saying the worst possible things at worst possible times, things like that."

He smiled broadly and ruffled the little girl's hair with a hand clad in a dark-green glove. His other hand, holding a multi-purpose tool, too bore a glove, much similar to mine.

"Soluna. You met my mommy. That over there is my daddy." The girl shook my hand and proceeded to shake Ben's. "They call him crazy, but he is not. And these are my tumble bunnies!"

"You could have always said that they call him Twig." Rolling her eyes, Kami cautioned her daughter. "Sounds much better than 'crazy'. Also, you meant 'Jedi' and not 'deejay'."

It was not my place to tell Kami to cut some slack to her child, and something else caught my attention. Crazy? I looked at Twig again, this time sure that he had at least some cybernetics and remembered what I was told on Jakku, some time ago. Detached from this plane of existence most of the time. Likely to embrace all Force sects at the same time, and then some. Chaotic at times, yet so peaceful. Not strong enough for a Jedi. Not keen on fighting. Most of his life happens in his own head. It was the man that Lor San Tekka told me to seek, should I want to hear a different take on things and should I want a Force-wielder other than the one I had in mind around.

The Crazy Man of Endor.


End file.
